


xxv. i think i'll just collapse right here, thanks

by tempestaurora



Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [25]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Divorce, Drug Use, Gen, Injury, Pre-Canon, Sibling Bonding, Whumptober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27196465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestaurora/pseuds/tempestaurora
Summary: All of the Umbrella Academy kids had crashed on Vanya's couch at some point in the half-decade before the end of the world.She'd actually started to expect them when someone knocked on the door.OR: All the times Vanya's siblings arrived at her apartment and crashed on the couch.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Luther Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves & The Hargreeves
Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930186
Comments: 26
Kudos: 254





	xxv. i think i'll just collapse right here, thanks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BubblyWashingMachine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BubblyWashingMachine/gifts).



> Prompt: Disorientation
> 
> thank god this month is almost over
> 
> edit: i forgot to gift this fic lmao. thank u to BubblyWashingMachine for the ideas for this one!

xxv. i think i’ll collapse right here, thanks

Vanya looked up from her violin practise when there was a knock at the door. She considered it for a moment before lowering the instrument and sighing. She hadn’t seen her neighbour’s cat, the rent was already paid, and she didn’t have any students today. Unless it was a travelling encyclopaedia salesman – and Vanya didn’t really think they were working anymore – she had a good guess at who it might be.

The only people who knocked on her door anymore were her siblings – and that was despite… _everything_ that had happened between them.

The first, she remembered, was—

LUTHER

He’d knocked heavily on her door and collapsed on the sofa, his black jumpsuit torn and scorched. His breathing had been laboured, uneven, and Vanya stared at the sight in front of her. He’d barely even said _hello._

“What the fuck,” Vanya said.

Luther’s eyes searched the room until they landed uncertainly on her. “Vanya?”

“Luther— _yes_ , it’s me. You’re in my apartment—what the hell happened?”

“Mission,” he coughed. His eyes fluttered shut and then reopened. “Went bad.”

“How bad?”

Luther shrugged and then hissed at the pain that must’ve flared. “I left before it ended.”

For a moment, Vanya stared at her brother. He’d _left before it ended_ – that meant it’d gone so badly that his overwhelming drive to do good had been crushed by his dwindling sense of self-preservation. Somewhere out there, people were maybe still getting hurt. Bad guys were running loose. Their father was disappointed in his Number One.

“I’ll get the first aid kit.”

It wasn’t stocked for what Luther needed. He needed blood and stitches and probably something to ward off infection. Most likely, her apartment was closer than the mansion was, than _Mom_ was.

“I’m calling an ambulance.”

He frowned and waved a vague hand. “No… no—don’t do that.”

“Luther—”

“Imagine the papers tomorrow.”

Vanya huffed. “It’s 2014, Luther. People read their news online now. I’m calling an ambulance.”

“Vanya—”

“I either call 9-1-1 or you die on my couch.” He seemed to be considering it, so she typed in the numbers. “It’s my couch, so I get to make the call.”

She went in the ambulance with him, despite it being Luther, despite it being a brother she didn’t know and hadn’t spoken to in half a decade. She didn’t even know he knew where she _lived._

She waited at the hospital, and filled out the forms when they were presented, and in the morning after, when his wounds had healed somewhat, from that extra durability Luther possessed, Vanya took him back to her apartment, not the mansion.

He slept on her newly-blood-stained couch for two weeks before he got his own place.

Vanya didn’t think Luther was at her door. Their relationship had mended a good amount in the past five years. They texted regularly and Luther always called before coming over. It was with his first pay check at the New York Fire Department that he bought her a brand-new couch, and with his second that he ordered a mountain of takeout for the two of them to share while watching movies.

She ran through them in number order as she started for the door. It wasn’t Luther, so next up was—

DIEGO

Diego didn’t knock on the door. Diego _broke in._ While Vanya was out, in fact, and stayed on her couch, bleeding, until she came home. Groceries spilled across the floor as she jumped, and Diego waved a sorry hand.

“Hey, sis.”

“What the _fuck._ ”

It reminded her, almost eerily, of that day with Luther, two years before. It’s almost like he’d given notes to Diego; they were even clasping the same spot on their ribs.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Diego asked, waving a hand at the _blood stain on the couch_ —

“Jesus Christ, Luther’s gonna be _pissed_.”

Diego pulled a face. “What’s Luther got to know about this?”

Vanya huffed and went searching for the first aid kit. It had been… expanded since Luther’s time on the old couch, and after he passed his exams for the NYFD, he’d taken her through the equipment and how to use it.

Vanya knelt heavily on the floor beside Diego.

“He loved this couch,” she told him. “And you’ve gone and gotten— _Diego_ all over it.” He rolled his eyes as she unzipped the bag. “What happened?”

“Mugger.”

“Mugger?”

“Mugger _s._ Multiple. Like three of them. First two were fine but the third had a knife—”

“You got _stabbed?_ ”

Diego grunted and Vanya let out a bark of laughter.

“Thanks, V.”

“No, no, it’s just— _knives._ They’re kinda your thing.”

“And it turns out they’re the _thing_ of half the criminals in the city,” he replied, then hissed as Vanya pulled up the edge of his shirt, to reveal the hole in his side. “The other half like guns.”

“How original of them.”

“I know, right? Like— _ow_ —get a new thing.”

Vanya rolled her eyes and considered the wound. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

He scoffed. “Do I _look_ like I’ve got insurance?”

“Alright,” she hummed. “But you’re gonna need stitches, and I can’t even _pretend_ to know what’s going on inside your body.”

“Latent x-ray vision hasn’t come in yet?” The two went silent from the jab, Vanya’s jaw locking off its own accord, and then Diego sighed. He asked, “You know how to do stitches?”

She shrugged. “Luther taught me.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve only had to do them on oranges, but—”

“Jesus Christ.”

“—it’s basically the same thing.”

It probably wasn’t Diego at the door. They weren’t _close_ by any means. They were barely even _friends._ But they gave each other birthday and Christmas presents and Vanya was the one who got called to sign him out of jail every time his detective ex-girlfriend or her partner locked him up for some nuisance or another and let him go out of the kindness of their hearts.

But it wouldn’t be Diego. Diego, decidedly, didn’t knock.

And if it wasn’t him, then it might’ve been—

ALLISON

She appeared on Vanya’s doorstep three days before Christmas in 2018. The living room was currently a mess of wrapping paper as Vanya tried – and failed – to wrap her siblings and co-workers’ Christmas presents. Knives, she’d discovered, were easy to wrap. The globe-slash-liquor-cabinet- _thing_ she’d bought for Luther was not.

“Allison?”

“Hi. Vanya.”

Vanya blinked and stepped aside. “Sorry about the mess—”

“It’s alright.”

“—I’m wrapping presents.”

A ghost of a smile passed over Allison’s lips. “You never could do it very well.”

Vanya tried for a smile too, but it was strange. It had been years since she’d been in the same room as her sister. She’d travelled out to L.A. for the wedding, some eight years ago, and drank an unreasonable amount at the open bar beside Diego, who’d also gotten ridiculously drunk. They’d argued and sang drinking songs and possibly gotten along for the only time in their _lives_ at that wedding, but Allison had invited neither of them out to L.A. when her daughter was born two years later.

Now, Allison seemed lost in the quiet comfort of Vanya’s apartment.

“What brings you to New York?” Vanya asked, as if Allison were an acquaintance and not a—a _sister._

“Oh—well. Um. It’s nothing, really.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just…” Allison pulled a face, and then slumped suddenly onto the couch. She let out a sob, one she’d clearly been holding in, and said, “Patrick’s _divorcing_ me.”

It probably wasn’t Allison at Vanya’s door. To her knowledge, she was filming in Texas and sending postcards from every location for her new movie. A cluster of them were stuck to the wall above the sink.

That day in Vanya’s apartment, Allison had cried and drank cheap scotch and then wrapped all of Vanya’s presents for her, as both an apology and the one thing she felt capable doing. She’d stayed until Christmas Eve, when she’d left for the airport after early Christmas dinner with Vanya and Luther, hoping to get home to be with her daughter on the 25th.

If it wasn’t Allison, then that only left—

KLAUS

Klaus was high when he banged on Vanya’s door at 3:27AM in the middle of the summer in 2017. He staggered past her and collapsed on the couch, face-first. He was asleep in seconds.

Vanya blinked.

“Alright then, I guess.”

She found a blanket in her bedroom and tucked him in.

He was gone by the time she woke up in the morning, but two weeks later was back for the exact same thing. Vanya tucked him in again, and this time left a scrap of paper with her phone number on it in his jeans pocket.

The next time he came to crash at her place in the middle of the night, he called first.

She saw Klaus rarely, if ever, these days. About six months before she’d signed him out of rehab at the end of his stint, and three months later he’d been blisteringly high on her couch, telling her all about the ghost that haunted his last apartment, which was why he had to move.

It was only midday, though – so it wouldn’t be Klaus. It _couldn’t_ be Klaus. Vanya was pretty sure he wouldn’t even be _awake_ at midday. So maybe it wasn’t her siblings. Maybe it was a delivery she forgot, or a neighbour introducing themselves after moving into the empty apartment upstairs.

Vanya sighed and opened the door.

On the other side, stood—

FIVE

Vanya stared.

“Hey, sis,” Five said, not looking a day over thirteen, despite the seventeen years it had been since his disappearance. He was wearing a baggy suit and pushed past her into the apartment. “What’s the date today?”

“Wh—what—wha—”

“The date.” He snapped his fingers, obviously peering around her place.

“Uh, uh—March. 21st.”

“2019?”

“Y-yeah.”

Five nodded to himself, then swivelled to face her. He sent her a flash of his snarky smile – the one she’d missed for _seventeen years._ Then he said, “Dad’s gonna die tonight. And in eleven days, the world’s gonna end.”

“Uh—”

“You got any coffee?”

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading!!! pls talk to me in the comments!!
> 
> if u have any ideas for day 27 (i am still crowdsourcing ideas,,, i am still struggling lmao,,, we're so close to the end), pls tell me in the comments and i'll gift the fic to u if i use it  
> title/theme: "okay, who had natural disasters on their 2020 bingo card?" (i'm willing to change this to 2019 lmao if needed)  
> prompt: "earthquake, extreme weather or power outage"


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